Sample Application: Student
Player Info - for ALL character types
Player Name: MP [This can be your real name or whatever internet handle you regularly use]
Player Age: Way, way over 18 [All players must be 18 or older; beyond that, you can tell us your specific age or not, as you please]
Contact Email: soldtoarmenians at crackedverse.com [The e-mail you'd like the admins to use for contacting you]
Do You Want Other Players To Know Who Is Playing This Character? (Choose one answer, delete the other)
-- Yes - list my Contact E-mail and Player Name in the Character Directory, if accepted
-- No - list my Character E-mail in the Directory, and show my Player Name as [Private]
Character Email: limitedpleasures at gmail dot com [You only need to fill this out if your answer to the previous question was No.]
If a current player, who do you play at Fandom High?: Mavis Dracula (alum), Bo Jones (townie/faculty)
AIM Screenname: soldtoarmenians
How did you find us?: via Trollprincess, the original game admin [This is mostly for new players, to give us a general sense of how much familiarity with the game you might already have. Longtime players have been known to use this space for saying they discovered us while searching the couch cushions for change.]
Character Info
Character Name: Dayna Mellanby
Fandom: Blake's Seven
Character Type: Student
Potential Character LJ: limitedpleasures
Character Age: 16
Students Only: Class: Junior
Character Background
1. Assume we've never even heard of your show/movie/game/book/comic/play (known as 'canon' from now on). Please explain it to us.:
Umpty-tumpty hundred years into the future (or "the 3rd century of the 2nd calendar" if you prefer the meaningless technobabble version), the Terran Federation has explored and colonized most of the Milky Way, but not ventured much further beyond. The government is too busy a) being thoroughly corrupt and b) spreading the somehow-still-existent British accent to all corners of the galaxy, because it's a BBC show, now shut up and enjoy your popcorn. Those in charge spend most of their time scrambling for power, money, and technology, oppressing and drugging the citizens, attempting to take over any remaining independent planets of any value, and using all sorts of things the Geneva Convention frowns on to make any dissidents recant or disappear.
One such dissident is Roj Blake, a well-meaning and extremely charismatic man who led a number of rebellions before being caught and "re-educated" (aka drugged and machine-conditioned) into a model citizen who publicly recanted his mistakes. When he's sucked back into the rebellion by old friends he doesn't remember, he's caught almost as quickly thanks to a government mole, and put on trial again. This time, though, to avoid painting Blake as a martyr and inspiring more rebellion, the Federation frames him on child molestation charges and ships him off to a penal planet.
On the way there, Blake meets a group of 4 fellow prisoners with whom he eventually escapes: Jenna Stannis is an attractive female pilot and smuggler. Vila Restal is a cowardly but incredibly gifted thief given to humor as a defense mechanism. Olag Gan is a huge, gentle man who killed a Federation guard for murdering his woman; he ended up a limiter implant in his brain that prevents him from killing again (despite being about as naturally violent as a baby bunny). Kerr Avon is a cold, snarky, self-serving bastard who just happens to be the most brilliant computer programmer in the galaxy, and only failed to embezzle the contents of the government's largest banking system because his girlfriend was a deep-cover Federation spy.
That makes 5 out of 7, if you're counting. En route to the penal planet, the prison ship runs into the debris of a space battle, which includes an alien spacecraft left floating unmanned, but seemingly undamaged. Blake, Jenna, and Avon (who've already staged one failed revolt) are sent across like miner's canaries to test its defenses, but instead of turning it over to the prison ship crew, they're welcomed by the ship's apparently sentient computer, Zen. (And baby makes 6.) They escape the prison ship, then follow to the penal planet to rescue Gan and Vila.
Huzzah, off they go into the wild black yonder in their newly-named ship, the Liberator, to be freedom fighters! Except for the fact that Vila isn't keen on the 'fighter' half of that title and Avon thinks a) the only freedom is a lot of money, a safe place to hide, and a quick way to get there and b) Blake is a complete fucking loon. Nonetheless, everyone sticks around for their own reasons, some more mercenary than others -- Avon wants the ship for himself, Gan and Jenna support Blake's cause, Vila... moans a lot about being in danger, but never actually leaves. During their first attempt to contact one of the off-Earth rebel cells, they instead find a wiped-out base and one remaining member determined to get revenge for the brutal way the group was massacred: a telepathic alien woman named Cally. Dingdingding, and that's seven!
Cue a buttload of attempts to destroy the government, some stupid and some disastrously successful. Also, a buttload of running from said government, particularly in the persons of Space Commander Travis, who's more than a little nuts after losing an arm and an eye to Blake, and Supreme Commander (later President) Servalan, who wears almost as much leather as Avon, is ridiculously hot despite her sometimes laughable dialogue, and is almost but not quite as good at amassing power as she is at having chemistry with freaking everyone.
The players who make up the Seven change hugely over the course of four seasons (Avon and Vila remain the only constants) because despite the early 80's fashion and sets picked up at the Doctor Who rummage sale, it's a damned dark show. Gan is killed during the second season, and not long after, exactly halfway through the show, Blake attempts to blow up the central computer complex that controls Federation information flow, weapons, climates, and a billion other things on Federated planets.
His attack would have worked (with massive innocent collateral damage because of the climate and life support capabilities he'd be shutting down) if an embittered Space Commander Travis hadn't sold out its location to an alien warfleet bent on invading. During the ensuing chaos (in which the crew temporarily joins with Federation forces to hold off the invasion), Blake and Jenna go missing; Jenna's never seen again, and Blake doesn't reappear in person until the series finale. Cally sticks around for a third season, then has the stupidest offscreen death ever, not that I'm bitter.
To fill in the gaps, we gain:
ORAC, yet another sentient computer, but brilliant and bad-tempered where Zen is... kind of Zen-like.
Dayna Mellanby (more later on her!), a young weapons designer whose escaped-dissident father was murdered by Servalan at the beginning of Season 3.
Del Tarrent, a Federation deserter who thinks he's Han Solo tries to snatch the Liberator while everyone's missing in the post-battle confusion, and is almost as awesome a pilot as he says he is.
In the final season, there's Slave, the groveling ship's computer for the next ship they steal after breaking their first one, and Soolin, very possibly the fastest gun in the galaxy, who gives Avon a run for his money in sarcasm and has really pretty hair.
The second half of the series is spent alternately recovering from the alien war, trying to find Blake, getting sidetracked by dramatastic personal-history issues, and watching the Federation start to rebuild itself. The Federation lost the government in the process of winning the war, but came crawling back out of the cracks in the brickwork like cockroaches after a nuclear holocaust; the remnants of the Seven are finally driven into being freedom fighters again out of necessity rather than ethics. (Which is convenient, since Avon kind of lacks those.) [If you want to avoid major series spoilers for Blake's 7, this would be a good place to stop reading and skip down to the Character section.]
One last rumor of Blake (which a now-obsessed Avon has taken to following without really bothering with little things like anybody else's agreement, and would now be a good time to mention how ludicrously slashy this show is?) leads them to a rebel encampment and a Blake who seems to have betrayed them. Not so much, but Avon finds that out a little too late. After shooting him. Because by this time they've both become complete fucking loons who are on the same side but don't trust each other enough to believe it. Then Federation soldiers, tipped off by Blake's second in command who betrayed him, burst in...and shoot absofrigginglutely everybody.
Can't say they didn't go out with a bang when the Beeb said no to Season 5. (Though it was set up so that had there been a Season 5, anyone who wanted to come back had a plausibly-survivable wound.)
2. Now onto your character. Please tell us about them. Appearance, personality, how they react to others in general and where they fit into the canon you explained above.
Dayna, played by Josette Simon (http://tonova.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/dayna3.jpg) is a young black woman of British descent, with close-cropped dark brown hair and a slim, athletic build. (Unimportant to the character but refreshing for a show from 1980, Dayna and her father's race is only mentioned twice in the series, first to reassure Avon that she's not one of the local tribe who attacked him, then later when trying to infiltrate a planet where the question of 'will I pass for a native' is answered with 'yes, their original colony contained representatives of all Earth races.')
Dayna's father, Hal Mellanby, was a defense systems designer who had been secretly supplying weapons to the resistance, before eventually leading a revolt himself, which failed. The survivors surrendered peacefully and were promised a fair trial, but instead everyone but Mellanby, including his wife, was massacred by Federation forces. Hal was taken in for questioning so 'overzealous' that it burnt out his optic nerves (though he has limited vision again with some technological help). He managed to escape and left Earth in secret with his young daughter, traveling eventually to the remote planet Sarran, where he grounded what was intended to be a fixed-orbit space station on the ocean floor, creating an undetectable base in which to hide out.
Once there, Mellanby adopted a child from the war-hungry native Sarran tribe (no details on why; presumably she was cast out or orphaned) and raised her alongside Dayna as his own. Dayna and her adopted sister Lauren grew up working with their father on weapons and defense systems, and being tutored by computers and the occasional much-trusted visitor that Hal allowed to know their location. The Sarrans were the only local trouble they had to worry about, and both of the girls became adept at outrunning or fighting them off. (Though Dayna disagreed with her father on whether said fighting should end in death; she said yes, he said use the stun guns, kiddo, and thus they lived to later murder Lauren. Really, Hal, sometimes the kiddo has a point.).
During the aftermath of the battle with the alien fleet, both Avon's escape capsule and Servalan's ship crashed on Sarran. Dayna found Avon and saved him from the locals. Servalan found Avon and stuck a gun in his face. Dayna found Servalan and stuck a notched arrow in hers. Smart people decided a truce could be a thing, what with the Sarrans bearing down on all of them at the time, so Dayna took them back to the Mellanby base, introducing them to her father and sister. In an utterly shocking turn of events, Servalan had some confusion over the meaning of the word 'truce' and once she'd got the information she wanted from Hal, she shot him. In the fake electronic eye. Then watched him stumble around the room and try to hit her with things for a while before finally shooting him again. In the back. Because she's classy like that. Dayna doesn't like Servalan much.
Especially since all the riling up of the natives required somebody to keep watch outside and Lauren volunteered -- which resulted in her finally getting recaptured by her own people and staked out to die, leaving Dayna with no family at all. She leaves Sarran with Avon (which her father had hoped she'd do anyway, to see more of the universe now that the war had broken the Federation's power) and vows to kill Servalan sooner or later. Spoiler: she doesn't. However, she certainly tries over the next two seasons, and can get pretty resentful when forced to let her father's murderer get away again.
Dayna doesn't spend a lot of time being emo about having lost her family, though unlike certain telepathic fellow crew members. Once aboard the Liberator, she gets quickly into the swing of Blake's cause (despite never having met him), since it was her father's cause as well, and is valuable both as a designer of new weapons for the crew and because she can still call on some of Hal's old contacts to help re-establish resistance against the regrouping Federation.
Personality-wise, Dayna's bold (or as her father says, reckless, but then he's a dad) and inquisitive, and has pretty much no personal hangups besides failure to win some individual fight, or someone thinking she's not worth fighting at all. Social hangups? Well, her idea of introducing herself to Avon is kissing him soundly as he's just waking up from unconsciousness, so let's just say she's not shy around new people. (Avon: "What was that for?" / Dayna: "Curiosity." / Avon: "I'm all in favor of healthy curiosity; let's hope yours isn't satisfied too easily.")
She'll get snarky with friend and enemy alike, but it's usually pretty mild with friends -- and once she trusts someone, it's hard to lose her loyalty. (Avon might be pushing it in the last few episodes of the series, admittedly, because he's gone pretty damned bugnuts.) Talk guns with her or offer to spar and she'll love you forever. Unless you're Vila, because then your offer to spar probably involves Jello, and you'll get shot down with a snicker, but at least it's not a gun. (All of the girls in the crew blow Vila off, sometimes a bit cuttingly, but he does tend to ask for it with the neverending, if harmless, lechery.)
Dayna can be freaked out if pushed too far in a terrifying situation (such as getting trapped in a dark cave with a heavy-breathing monster that gives off an aura of evil and corruption, go figure) but she's generally competent and hard to scare -- though her reaction to perceived threats often goes straight to shooty mcbangbang and a slightly bloodthirsty grin.
3. Powers! Does your character have any abilities (powers, skills, training or weapons) that go beyond what a normal person would have?:
No special powers; she's a completely baseline human. However, abilities-wise, Dayna is highly athletic, good at hand-to-hand combat, and expert with an entire range of weaponry and defense systems from high-tech (laser pistols, tiny electronic bombs) to what we'd consider modern (percussion guns, standard explosives) to primitive (knife, sword, longbow, staff, etc.). She not only uses weapons, she designs and builds them; it's her passion.
Dayna: "I like the ancient weapons -- the spear, the sword, the knife. They demand more skill. When you fight with them, conflict becomes more personal. More exciting." / Avon: "More dangerous." / Dayna: "Of course! Without danger, there's no pleasure." / Avon: "That must limit your range of pleasures a bit."
She's bright but not a genius (except with weapons), and has a fairly advanced but rather eclectic education, from computer training and the expert tutors that her father had shipped in to work with Dayna and her sister. She could probably, for instance, tell you all about the historical origin of the trebuchet and how to breed cancer-resistant mole-rats (the former tutor that we actually meet was a geneticist), but not who Margaret Thatcher was.
Finally, and rather randomly, she can sing and play the lyre, or a space-age version of it -- though this only ever comes up once, because Tanith Lee wrote the episode and God forbid she not include an original song or poem in everything she writes ever.
- [Just to show you what we'd look for if the character did have non-normal powers, here's how this part of the application would be written for Cally instead of Dayna.]
{Cally is a projecting telepath; she can't read minds, but she can project her mental voice into the minds of others - pretty much the way Jono Starsmore/Chamber communicates, though Cally also speaks aloud.
She's also mildly empathic/psychically sensitive at the speed of the plot; for instance, though she can't hear his thoughts, she can feel Vila's pain when he gets a broken arm re-set just as she's trying to project to him. Supposedly only another Auronar can directly contact her mind-to-mind, but this gets proved questionable on at least three occasions when non-Auron aliens speak into her head and/or take her over. For the purposes of RP and filling plotholes, I'm going with the supposition that her people have never met non-Auronar telepaths before, so that's just their mistaken assumption, and she can in fact receive messages from other telepaths. (During the entire run of the show, they never meet a human telepath, so it seems plausible.)
The handwavy power-boundaries are made up for in an unintentionally humorous fashion by her status as the Galaxy's Most Possessible telepath, three years running. Her mental defenses suck, mostly because a) she's lonely without her people around, and b) she never learned to have defenses; she grew up with everybody in everybody else's head all the time and it was all very polite, naive and guaranteed to get them killed if they wandered offworld for very long. (Another oft-repeated Auron saying is "A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken." Avon followed that up at one point with, "Cally once told me that that was a saying amongst her people. Cally was murdered. So were most of her people.")
Aside from the psychic stuff, her expertise is in technological communications and -- at least as an adult -- she's decent with a blaster-type gun. (As a teenager, she's probably had some self-defense training because they're neutral but not stupid, but she's no expert fighter.) She becomes the Liberator's go-to girl for medical issues as well, so we can assume that as a teen she at least has some good first aid training.
Finally, she comes from a high-tech society that's spacefaring (if isolationist) and is probably familiar enough with space transportation to at least pilot a shuttle. Mostly because there's no evidence otherwise and it's a convenient setup to get her to FH. }
4. Why is your character coming to Fandom and what kind of situation are they leaving behind at home? (ie: where in the canon timeline do they come from?):
Dayna would be coming in a couple of years pre-show (her exact age isn't given in canon, but she's probably meant to be 19/20-ish then), while she and her family were still living in secrecy and relative safety on the planet Sarran. Blake is just starting to make a name for himself in his first rebellion, before he gets caught and brainwashed, but that's nothing that impacts the Mellanbys beyond Hal rooting for him like a favorite sports team.
One of Dayna and Lauren's more trusted tutors comes to tell Hal that he's been sent information about a school that could benefit the girls far more than being isolated on this planet with only each other and the occasional visitor for company. Best of all, it's somewhere the Federation can't touch them: Earth, in the past, long before there was a Federation. After much convincing that the place is real, Hal makes the offer to his daughters; they're both reluctant to leave him, but Lauren makes the case that she should stay and Dayna should go, because someone should stay with him, and Dayna was born on Earth and should get to see it. Besides, depending on how things work out, she could always join Dayna later. (Not that this will ever happen in practice, because Lauren has about 5 total minutes of screentime and isn't a playable character at FH.)
5. Is there any reason that they might cause trouble to other characters in the Fandom High setting due to behavior or abilities?:
Not really; Dayna's largely friendly and has a good sense of humor. She loves to fight, but she's not combative in a way that leads to her getting into them for stupid reasons. She does hold grudges hard if you hurt/kill someone she cares about, and has no problems with going eye-for-an-eye, nor is she big on letting a downed enemy live if they were actively trying to kill her, but canon shows she can be talked down from both situations.
6. Links to character/series information:
Blake's 7 on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake%27s_7
The Sevencyclopedia - more than you ever wanted to know: http://www.hermit.org/Blakes7/SevenCyc/
Transcripts for all 52 episodes of the show: http://www.hermit.org/Blakes7/Episodes/scripts/index.html
Incomplete but snarkeriffic episode guide: http://www.thevervoid.com/media/blakes7/blakemenu.htm
Problem Solving: Things don't go how you expected them to and you find yourself in a situation where you don't get what you want. How will you react out of character as a player? How will you have your character react to the situation?:
[We're not filling this one in for you!]
Additional Notes/Canonmate Check-Ins: Have you contacted the players from this canon who are already in game? Yup! All zero of them.
Business Check-Ins: Have you checked the directory for your business and contacted the owner/manager if necessary? (choose one answer, delete the others!)
* Not applicable - not a townie, it's a brand new business, or there is no owner/manager listed
Do you have any other information you feel we should know about the character or you as a player that doesn't fit in the categories above?:
Marina Sirtis auditioned unsuccessfully for Dayna's part, 8 years before she was cast as Deanna Troi in Star Trek: the Next Generation.
Writing Sample: please write at least 300-500 words *in character* having your character do something, anything, set on Fandom Island.
"I've read the student handbook," said Dayna, voice as taut with impatience as her bowstring. She sighted across the open wilderness of the Preserve rather than roll her eyes directly at the woman in the security uniform who'd just appeared from behind a large boulder. "I've been lectured by my roommate, my sibling, a painting at the end of the sixth floor hallway and a man in a green spangled unitard. I get it. Not in the dormitory. I am allowed to use this outside, though, yes?"
The woman seemed to have at least a bit more patience to spare than Dayna did. "Yes. But when somebody tells me one of the new students just raced away from the weapons locker with a longbow and a quiver full of arrows, it's kind of my job to check it out, for everybody's safety."
"I know what I'm doing." Dayna toned down the attitude a bit; it was fair enough, given some of the types she'd met so far, for the staff to worry about that sort of thing. "I've been trained in archery since I was a child. I'm not going to accidentally shoot any of the locals."
"Good to hear. Unless-"
This time Dayna did grace her with a targeted eyeroll, though the bow didn't move with her; the arrow stayed trained on a tiny hummock of rustling grass about fifty meters away in the shade of a towering dark tree. "Or on purpose. I'm not hunting humans. "
"If I thought you were, I'd have showed up with this in my hand instead of on my belt." The security woman rolled her eyes right back and tapped a clunky-looking metal sidearm without making any move to draw it. "Students running out with weapons usually means either we're under attack, or they think we are. If we are, I need to know, and if not, please don't shoot the teal deer."
"I did say I read the handbook." Rustle, rustle... snicker? Dayna's gaze shot back to her target, eyes narrowing. "The deer are a protected species, the squirrels are members of the press corps, the wolves are all students or related to them, and any animal I see might actually be a friend in the middle of a really bad day. Trust me, I know what I'm after, and it's not any of-"
Rustle, rustle, nyah nyah na nyaaaaaaaah nyah!
"Right, I WARNED you!" The string thwanged, the bolt flew true, and there was a tiny, undignified shriek as it found its mark. Not from Dayna, mind you, who stalked quick and silent across the field, school security ignored entirely in favor of a deep, smug smile.
The tiny shrieking came from the equally tiny blue man pinned to the trunk of the tree. Not by his flesh; as she'd intended, the arrow had caught and carried him along by the garishly-striped... skirt-thing he wore, and now hung upside down by, bare blue legs and arms (among other parts) flailing madly.
And yet he still didn't drop the bit of shiny red fabric he was holding, small by human standards but nearly as long as the little man himself. Dayna had to lean down and snatch it from his hand, grinning fiercely at him as she did so. "Mine," she said firmly, then turned on her heel to walk away.
"Lemme doon! Ye kinnae jes' leave m'here, y' great daft bigjob..."
"Watch me," she said, not looking back. "I told you not to steal from me."
Dayna did give a polite nod to the frowning security chief as she shouldered the bow and walked past her. It didn't distract the woman from staring at the pair of red silk underwear that Dayna waved in her other hand like a triumphant battleflag, though.